Flickr announces major update to Galleries section

It's been fairly quiet around Flickr since it was taken over by SmugMug but now the image sharing platform has announced a major update to its galleries section. The new Flickr galleries come with a redesigned user interface and a number of new tools to "facilitate your creativity."

In a post on the Flickr Blog the company says that "Flickr’s galleries have long been one of the tools available to our community for visual storytelling, though they have gotten dusty over time as the rest of the site progresses.”

The new layout has been designed for larger screen sizes and resolutions than the previous version and the maximum number of photos in galleries has been increased from 50 to 500. To facilitate work with large numbers of photos you now batch add them to a gallery directly from your Favorites.

On the galleries list page you'll now find a triptych of photos for each gallery (the cover photo and the two most recent images), plus some metadata.

You can still select any image from the gallery to use it as the cover, edit title and description and reorder images. Galleries can also be shared "with an intuitive share sheet that will improve the presentation of your galleries on other social networks.”

If you are a Flickr user, head over to the Flickr galleries page to check out the redesign and new features.

Comments

Really! There are many other improvements Flickr could do. How about limiting people faving your photos by the hundreds. I can never understand why people will fave my photos for days on end..... hundreds and hundreds of them.... without even leaving a comment. Then I go to to person's Flickr page and see they have 400,000+ photos faved. More control of your Flickr page would be nice. In the past I have blocked people..... only to have the fave stuff start up again with another person, who I am sure is the same person.

I understand that I am just basically repeating what others have alluded to.....but....really....

How does Flikr stay in business? Or, I guess, how are they able to justify being viable? I literally know of NO ONE that uses them. And while I understand that the people I know are just a small sample size, it appears by reading the other comments that this appears to be a "theme". Instagram has taken over. Even 500px has remained more viable from what I've seen/heard.

There used to be a lot of activity on Flickr, but now it is a shadow of its former self. It's a lot easier to find people and to be found on Instagram now.

Flickr lacks the customizabilty of Smugmug, Zenfolio, etc. but it is also lacking the level of social interaction of Instagram. It fails both as a portfolio site and as a social network.

I already have a website on Zenfolio, and I have already have 5 times more followers on Instagram after 5 months than I do on Flickr after 9 years, so it is hard to find reasons to keep using Flickr. Under Smugmug's ownership, hopefully they can change that. This update to the Galleries feature is a good sign.

I had more social interaction in my first week on instagram than over a decade on Flickr. The problem with Flickr in the current environment I think is there's no "casual" social element. Commenting and faving pictures as well as following people is a bit more involved, just enough to disincentivize the practice for a lot of people.

As many commenters have said, the Yahoo! account login requirement is a major irritation. I said as much in a Tweet to Flickr and suggested that users should be able to login using Google or Facebook. This was their response: "It is something on the roadmap. Stay tuned!". Good news.

I am quite happy when I see people say this as it is a huge problem I have had. I don't even use Flickr anymore due to not being able to log in with my old account. I just didn't have it in me to create a new Google account so that I could have a fresh login. I took years off my life trying to figure out how to log in with my current Yahoo acvounts. I literally had so much trouble it would make me angry for the rest of the day. As most of us do I have hundreds of logins over the web and this was such a problem that I really just walked away from Flickr.

I never even could figure out what the issue was as when I would log in, it either logged me in with a username I didn't want to use or something I really don't even remember. Ughhh.

Isn't it amazing how a huge corporation (like Yahoo) stuck with such a messed up log in system for so long... well till the bitter bitter end. That decision alone ( to fix nothing ) must have devalued flickr enormously due to countless millions of users who simply gave up. I know at least a few myself.

Yip I totally agree. Pity about their ongoing link to Yahoo's log in system.. hope that gets fixed asap. But the rest of the interface works for me for 10 years now. Tags, sets, collections, search, presentation, etc. all works. I don't get why people like instagram so much. It should be named squintagram cause you get to squint to see the images.

The best thing about Flickr how it motivates me to up my game; every time I think I’m gods gift to photography I go to Flickr and inevitably I find someone shooting with a Canon 10D or a Nikon D70 creating magical pictures that make me weep, not just for their beauty but also for how far I have to go to even be decent.

Like creative writing, photography is an activity where a person without any training can follow their instincts and often get professional results. Of course, being on a trip to a beautiful place and picking your best shots is not the same as photographing a wedding in the rain, but still.

It's a different story when you are a professional. You can justify to buy a expensive camera. But for the average user it's hard to spend 2000 EUR on a body and several thousands on lenses. This is insanity.

While I'm not as cynical as some; I am pleased with the improvement(s). Galleries are just one of the new or otherwise 'improvements.' I've been a SmugMug Pro user for several years, and there was a time when I felt like bailing; due mainly to their lack of response to my questions. They used to respond to customer concerns; guess that was the honeymoon phase. Anyway, I just recently joined the Flickr Pro service (paid version) with the hope that SmugMug will eventually merge the two services with expanded utility, so I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Bad sides of Flicker: - The sharpening algorithm - it can be tricky to know if the lens, the photo's been taken with, is sharp or not. I absolutely hate it!- The Yahoo account requirement.- The constantly spamming pop-up to sign up.- Integration to HERE maps instead of Google.Good sides:- You can search by camera or lens model, genre etc- Convenient and friendly exif info under the photo.- It's (was?) photography oriented, simple and comfortable to use.

Well, yes, of course you can simply use the "search" field; then you will get the photos of people like me (!) who carefully add tags to each of their photos what lens was used. The vast majority of all photos is not tagged like that, though.

OTOH for cameras there is s dedicated search function that simply uses the EXIF data (which most photos have). But that works only for cameras, not for lenses. That was my point.

Black is only more energy efficient for OLEDs (which affects only a small portion of smartphone or tablet users). For TFTs as well as for old CRTs the color does not make a difference for energy consumption.

But I totally agree on black or dark grey being a better choice for the background from an aesthetics perspective.

I am an avid Flickr user as well and really do not want to see it ruined in the least. But in all honesty, the updates they made to the Galleries is a great change that makes them easier to use and the photos are displayed in a much more prominent way.

And compared to the previous owners, I get the feeling that the folks at Smugmug are committed to the Flickr user and will only improve the site and the user experience.

I post all my work on Flickr. as far as I can see, over there people are really passionate about photography itself, they try different techniques, approach various styles, and can be a real source of inspiration. it may sound as a cliché, but Instagram is good for teenagers or cute girls showing lots of skin looking for attention rather than a serious photography website. G+ is dead, FB is a leftist censorship deadend etc.flickr is underrated because it is a dinosaur from the internet's conception times, but at least it offers quality content. better than the selfie machines FB or IG.Flickr is good when you are also good, and really helps one improve its photography skills, be it photo editing or composition. it makes me think twice about what I post and how I can improve my images' quality

Why should people use flickr nowadays? Or why should photographers/hobbyists use it? Who would, should use it? How is it used? I'm really just asking here. Isn't there better sites if you want to sell some of your photos or get more people to see them?

I keep posting all my favorite photos on flickr, knowing no one will see it, its kind of dropbox of all my edited photos, I think if they accept to login via your facebook or google account this site can become great again..

Sorry, I didn't read Bassiavet's comment right - I meant to say I use YouPic to showcase my work in high quality, as I would with Flickr. Unfortunately there's no option to download, so YouPic is not an "archival" type of site. It's more a showcase site, they also have a beta Shop / Print option, but I haven't tried it yet.

I can't log into Flickr any more. They made a Yahoo account a necessity, then my Yahoo account was deactivated because I never used it for e-mail, because guess what, I never wanted a Yahoo account. Before the multiple ownership changes and Yahoo control-freakery it was a decent site, alas.

Has anything changed in the service owner's policy of using your pictures for their own purposes when and how they like, without ever asking? I remember that when such behaviour could be observed shortly after Yahoo had taken over in 2005, it made a lot of users leave Flickr. I do have an account which dates back that far, but I never even started to really use it after that.

There's nothing like that in the Flickr terms of use. Perhaps you refer to an old controversy with the use of CC images. This was settled a long time ago. In fact, Flickr gives you much more protection of your work than the likes of Facebook and Instagram.

No, it had nothing to do with CC images specifically. Yahoo was freely using users' images for promoting Flickr at the time, without asking, whether or not they were explicitly reserving such a right in their terms or not. I don't remember whether they did, but in any case that wouldn't be the point.

Facebook and Instagram? I wouldn't touch any of them with a ten foot pole.

If there was no such problem with Flickr anymore and if there was a chance that they will refrain from imposing massive user interface changes for the worse in the future (the current one from the article seems to be ok), I might even try it again.

Never gotten Galleries. A sort of mash up of Albums and faves. of course it gives you the possibility to make galleries like: over processed crap, clearly not in focus and all sorts of other critiscisms. But who would want to view those? The same people who post ceaseless praise under every photo that passes their timeline?

They still need to figure out what the use case of galleries is. It still remains a collection of other peoples photography on a site oriented at your own photography.

People ignore the feature because it's not relevant to their use of the site, which tends to be structured around sharing your own photography with others, browsing others photography or interacting in groups.

I predict a brief uptick in use of the feature tied to the announcement, then most will go back to ignoring it as the overall feature itself adds nothing to user's experience of the site.

Still have my flickr account but haven't used it for > 8 years. I replaced it with my personal photo website. To share photos, I found IG, G+, and fb better suitable options. Flickr was a good idea at the time but didn't evolve further and many - including me - disliked the Yahoo-based main platform with all its security issues in recent past. Might be getting better now after flickr has been sold, but I don't intend to go back since I expect it to become more commercialized in the future.

Kind of, I figure there's still pockets that are active but it's definitely a smaller audience... I was looking thru the group for the Pixel when it came out since people were excited about it's camera, I know Trey Ratcliff used to share stuff there... I never explored it much even tho I liked a few key things about G+ that other social networks are only now copying. Google force feeding it to people at the start didn't turn out well, but they've done terrible with everything social/messaging related outside of Gmail.

@mouzhik: yes, I agree with you, Google+ also is no longer the platform it has been before. I am posting there only rarely at this point, too. I believe Google+ lost the battle against fb groups which I see gained a lot more attraction in recent times. Nevertheless, I like the structure/sorting within Google+ groups better than on fb - also the photos were displayed better there.

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